EPIC FAIL or How to cook gratin dauphinois right the first time

Yesterday I made my first French dish, a well-known and well-loved comfort food from the Dauphiné region, the Gratin Dauphinois. And I ruined it. Not because I burned it (like I usually do) or I needlessly experimented (maybe sometimes I get carried away) but because it escaped my knowledge that different occasions require different types of tubers. Apparently, there are taters for salads, frying, baking, mashing, soups, casseroles, roasting and barbecuing - and I learned all this the hard way.

(There are other variations of the recipe, you can check this one out from Julia Child, or this one from About.com. The one I have below is from a French cookbook.)

Gratin Dauphinois with a pinch of fail à la Stripeysocks.

This recipe is for 1 pan,
I made 2 so that's double the whole recipe :)

Last Thursday I made 2 pans of gratin dauphinois for a party using the recipe a friend gave me. I had all the ingredients, meticulously measured and prepared: the potatoes sliced uniformly thin so the lovely little scallops would cook evenly, I had the perfect amount of crème fraîche, and I had rapé cheese at the ready. I pre-boiled the potatoes in cream and milk, then baked them at the exact temperature in a pre-heated oven  for the exact amount of time said in the recipe. I even buttered and rubbed garlic on the pyrex. AND nothing burned. I did not deviate from the process one bit because this dish was make or break; I had to do this right because my first attempt at French cooking is meant to be historic!

But leave it to me to mess up the most basic thing.

The key miscalculation was the chances of me getting the kind of potato wrong, which is about 8:1.  I may be practically illiterate in French but I at least know that it's a pomme de terre (literally, apple from the ground). But put me in a French supermarket in front of the produce section and I'm grabbing the first 2-kilo bag of yellow potatoes out there. Ergo, I baked potatoes that were for boiling. 

Come dinner, it was announced that I made gratin dauphinois: THE gratin dauphinois that every French child grew up with, that holds lovely memories of winter and of snow and of the alps, memories that could be stirred back to life by awakening their taste buds, taste buds that I kind of trampled on with that sacrilege I called a gratin.

After the first tasting my friend put it back in the oven for 30 minutes, but it wasn't enough so she put it back in again. At first we thought I wasn't cooked enough, but then it became plain that something was definitely wrong with it because it resisted being cooked, as if the spuds resisted being eaten.

Ugh. I miss the Philippines - over there, a potato is just a potato.

So my only advice for those who want to attempt this is: check the potato first. Ask around. It's better than having two giant pyrexes of FAIL.